Category Archives: Solar

Build Your Own 15 Watt PV Solar Panel – $130 – Sat. May 12.

Build Your Own PV Panel Workshop –Date: May 12, 2007

Cost: $50

Location: Lowell, MA

Learn how to assemble your own Photovoltaic (PV) panel for producing electicity. Richard Komp has pioneered PV panel production as a cottage industry in Nicaragua, Mali, and Haiti. In this workshop you’ll get to participate in assembling a PV panel. Depending on the number of participants, we will be making one or more 15 Watt panels, which are capable of charging 12 V batteries and thus are good for small applications.

  • What You’ll Learn: How cells and panels are made and how they work. If you don’t know how to solder, we’ll teach you that as well.
  • Time: 9 – 5 pm, Lunch included. Contact us if you are vegetarian or have other specialty dietary needs.
  • Cost: $50; optionally, pre-purchase a 15 Watt panel for an additional $80 or purchase a panel during the workshop Participants: 10 maximum
  • Instructors:Dr. Richard Komp, Virginio Mendonça

Phone: 978 453 4787

Email: virginio@virginiosbackyard.com
http://www.virginiosbackyard.com/workshops.html

Solar-powered concerts

Sustainable Waves

describes itself as follows:

 Sustainable Waves specializes in sustainable solutions for the entertainment industry. We provide solar powered stages & sound systems and a variety of conscious products and services. From pollution free concerts to innovative products, Sustainable Waves is a logical approach to creating value. With artistic inspiration, we integrate with existing business models. Taking one step at a time, we strive to inspire the currents of the global economy.

This is, of course, a lovely idea. But the precise terms of the idea – well, they’re not so precise. The second sentence describes “solar powered stages and sound systems;” the third sentence uses the words “pollution free concerts.” My reading is that this implies that all of the electricity used on stage and to reinforce the sound during the concert, beause of the phrase “pollution free.” “Pollution free

” (emphasis mine) concerts would have no pollution generated by any aspect of the concert – including transportation of performers, crew, house staff, and audience.

It’s possible, too, that they’re only using it with small audiences, during the day and out-of-doors – reducing the energy needed for lighting and sound reinforcement.

Possibilities of exaggeration or imprecision aside, it’s a great idea, especially if audiences see the PB panels on their way in and out – not to mention people who see their PV trailers on the road. (photographs here)

Via Dethroner.

The Staten Island Ferry – Sailing to the Future

Staten Island Ferry Terminal Solar Array, photo copyright (C) L. Furman. 2007. All rights reserved.

The next time you ride the Staten Island Ferry take a good look at the roof of the terminal on the Whitehall Street terminal on the Manhattan side, pictured above. You can see beautiful blue things that look like windows. They’re not windows. They’re photovoltaic solar modules. Just like the solar chips that power your calculators, and the solar powered walkway lights you see all over the suburbs, these convert sunlight into electricity, and provide power for the ferry terminal, Atlantis Energy Systems, late of Poughkeepsie, NY, produced the system.

If they solar electricity systems in the public schools and other buildings used as emergency shelters after Katrina, and those systems were configured to come on when the sun came out the morning after after the storm – as it always has and always will – then they would have had emergency shelters with power.

But unlike conventional emergency power systems, these would be emergency power systems that don’t use fuel, and that are used all the time. They are therefore more efficient and because they do not burn fuel they don’t create waste.

For additional information, click here.

Magnetek built the inverters used to connect the system to the electric grid.